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hudebnik

Re-posting for visibility: petition on deficits and jobs

I've created a petition to the White House on the proposition that, for this year, job growth is a more urgent problem than deficit reduction.

While Republicans and Democrats in Washington argue about how to cut deficits right now, they don't seem to have seriously considered the prerequisite question of whether to cut deficits right now. Republicans who had no objections to the rapidly-growing deficits of the GWB administration suddenly decided under the Obama administration that deficits were a critical problem -- presumably because they wanted to keep jobless rates high long enough that Obama wouldn't be re-elected. Inexplicably, Democrats went along with this, presumably because it sounded "responsible".

In fact, most of the things a government can do to cut deficits also cost jobs, which leads to higher deficits the following year as fewer people pay taxes and more people draw welfare. And with interest rates as low as they've been in my lifetime, our current huge deficits are actually not costing much in debt service; if there was ever an acceptable time to run a deficit, now is that time. If we want a long-term, sustainable solution to budget deficits, it'll require getting Americans back to work (among other things).